When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element and smelt it like water,
Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a little troublesome, a little terrible.
I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death nor in a walled garden,
In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that easily lock the world out of doors.
Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet granite sea-fang it is easy to
Life and water and the shining stones: but whose cattle are the herds of the people that one should love them?
If they were yours, then you might take a cattle-breeder's delight in the herds of the future.
Not yours.
Where the power ends let love, before it sours to jealousy. Leave the joys of government to Caesar.
Who is born when the world wanes, when the brave soul of the world falls on decay in the flesh
Comes one with a great level mind, sufficient vision, sufficient blindness, and clemency for love.
This is the breath of rottenness I smelt; from the world waiting, stalled between storms, decaying a little,
Bitterly afraid to be hurt, but knowing it cannot draw the savior Caesar but out of the blood-bath.
The apes of Christ lift up their hands to praise love: but wisdom without love is the present savior,
Power without hatred, mind like a many-bladed machine subduing the world with deep indifference. The apes of Christ itch for a sickness they have never known; words and the little envies will
Measure against that blinding fire behind the tragic eyes they have never dared to confront.
Point Lobos lies over the hollowed water like a humped whale swimming to shoal;
Point
Was wounded with that fire; the hills at Point Sur endured it; the palace at Thebes; the hill Calvary.
Out of incestuous love power and then ruin.
A man forcing the imaginations of men,
Possessing with love and power the people: a man defiling his own household with impious desire.
King Oedipus reeling blinded from the palace doorway, red tears pouring from the torn
Under the forehead; and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill in the earthquake, against the
Frightfully uplifted for having turned inward to love the people: -that root was so sweet O dreadful agonist? -I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to its expiation;
I heard the same cry.
A bad mountain to build your world on.
Am I another keeper of the people, that on my own shore,
On the gray rock, by the grooved mass of the ocean, the sicknesses I left behind me concern me?
Here where the surf has come incredible ways out of the splendid west, over the
Light nor life sounds forever; here where enormous sundowns flower and burn through color to quietness;
Then the ecstasy of the stars is present?
As for the people,
I have found my rock, let them find theirs.
Let them lie down at Caesar's feet and be saved; and he in his time reap their daggers of gratitude.
Yet I am the one made pledges against the refuge contempt, that easily locks the world out of doors.
This people as much as the sea-granite is part of the God from whom I desire not to be fugitive.
I see them: they are always crying.
The shored Pacific makes perpetual music, and the stone
Their music of silence, the stars blow long pipings of light: the people are always crying in their hearts.
One need not pity; certainly one must not love.
But who has seen peace, if he should tell them where
Lives in the world…they would be powerless to understand; and he is not willing to be reinvolved.
How should one caught in the stone of his own person dare tell the people anything but relative to that?
But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once, of man and woman, of
And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of living and dead, of human and
Human, and dimly all the human future: -what should persuade him to speak?
And what could his words change?
The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed.
But the man's words would be fixed also,
Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same present compulsion in the iron consistency.
And nobody sees good or evil but out of a brain a hundred centuries quieted, some
Prophet's, a man humped like a camel, gone mad between the mud- walled village and the mountain sepulchres.
Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the open farms, and the people are fed.
They import and they consume reality.
Before sunrise a hawk in the desert made them their thoughts.
Here is an anxious people, rank with suppressed bloodthirstiness.
Among the mild and
Gautama needed but live greatly and be heard,
Confucius needed but live greatly and be heard:
This people has not outgrown blood-sacrifice, one must writhe on the high cross to catch at their memories;
The price is known.
I have quieted love; for love of the people I would not do it.
For power I would do it.—But that stands against reason: what is power to a dead man, dead under torture? —What is power to a
Living, after the flesh is content?
Reason is never a root, neither of act nor desire.
For power living I would never do it; they're not delightful to touch, one wants to be separate.
For
After the nerves are put away underground, to lighten the abstract unborn children toward peace…A man might have paid anguish indeed.
Except he had found the standing sea-rock that even this
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace that quiets the desire even of praising it.
Yet look: are they not pitiable?
No: if they lived forever they would be pitiable:
But a huge gift reserved quite overwhelms them at the end; they are able then to be still and not cry.
And having touched a little of the beauty and seen a little of the beauty of things, magically
Across the funeral fire or the hidden stench of burial themselves into the beauty they admired,
Themselves into the God, themselves into the sacred steep unconsciousness they used to
Asleep between lamp's death and dawn, while the last drunkard stumbled homeward down the dark street.
They are not to be pitied but very fortunate; they need no savior, salvation comes and takes them by force,
It gathers them into the great kingdoms of dust and stone, the blown storms, the stream's-end ocean.
With this advantage over their granite grave-marks, of having realized the petulant human
Before, and then the greatness, the peace: drunk from both pitchers: these to be pitied?
These not
But while he lives let each man make his health in his mind, to love the coast opposite
And so be freed of love, laying it like bread on the waters; it is worst turned inward, it is best shot farthest.
Love, the mad wine of good and evil, the saint's and murderer's, the mote in the eye that makes its
Shine the sun black; the trap in which it is better to catch the inhuman God than the hunter's own image.
Anonymous submission.
